Detroit Faces Its Critics With Anger and Tears

MICHELINE MAYNARD

Saturday

Mar 28, 2009 at 5:17 AM

Detroiters said they wished they could persuade the country why G.M. and Chrysler, and by extension the city, deserved to be saved.

DETROIT — Just across the city line, AJ’s Music Cafe is hosting a 10-day marathon of live music called the Assembly Line Concert, meant to both help auto workers and set a world record for an uninterrupted performance.

Among the dozens of bands performing this week under banners for the United Automobile Workers union is the unfortunately named “National Ghost.”

It is a label that Detroit and its auto industry are trying to fend off as they rally support for a lifeline from the Obama administration, which appears to be willing to provide more short-term help to General Motors and Chrysler, but is still not ruling out the possibility of letting the companies go bankrupt.

“Detroit is a city that makes things,” said Mary Scheible, a native Detroiter and college guidance counselor at Loyola High, an all-male school in a gritty northside neighborhood.

“I wish people would attempt to understand the kind of person who has worked on the line, and whose father worked on the line, and whose grandfather worked on the line,” she said, her voice breaking as she talked above the din of adolescent chatter. “There is a sense of pride in that.”

The city has been lacking for leaders to give voice to such sentiments. Detroit still has only an acting mayor, Ken Cockrel Jr., after Kwame M. Kilpatrick resigned amid a text-messaging scandal. And the auto companies’ chief executives were chastened last fall, when members of Congress berated them for flying to Congressional hearings on corporate jets.

The state’s logical cheerleader in chief, Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, has all but disqualified herself by becoming an adviser on the auto bailout to the Obama administration, associating herself with the view expressed by the president in an interview with “60 Minutes” on Sunday that “the only thing less popular than putting money in the banks is putting money into the auto industry.”

In interviews in recent days, a cross-section of Detroiters — often through tears, or with anger and anguish — said they wished they could convince the country that G.M. and Chrysler, and by extension the city, deserved to be saved.

Marty Hershock, the son of a Detroit police officer who grew up in a neighborhood filled with auto workers, said area residents were perplexed by both the nation’s indifference and scorn since the auto companies sought bailouts last fall.

“There’s an overwhelming sense of confusion and anxiety,” said Mr. Hershock, a professor of American history at the University of Michigan’s branch in Dearborn. “People don’t know where to turn.”

Paul W. Smith, a popular morning show host on WJR-AM, tries to assure listeners that Detroit can survive.

“We’re going to get through all of this, and we’re going to get through it together,” Mr. Smith said last week, as the first streaks of sunlight illuminated the city skyline outside his window in the Fisher Building. “We’re not going to let something like this get the best of us.”

That determination has helped Detroit through numerous boom and bust cycles, said Kevin Boyle, a Detroit native and professor of history at Ohio State University. “Without those true believers, Detroit or any city would become a hollow place,” he said.

But Mr. Smith echoed a common feeling around Detroit that the city was being unfairly bashed by members of Congress who did not understand the contributions it had made.

“The auto executives should have stood up to those guys,” said Dane Fortney, a manager with Lacks Trim Systems, an automotive supplier that makes chrome-plated trim for cars like the Dodge Challenger.

Mr. Fortney, a former high school football player who grew up near a G.M. plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., was upset on Sunday by Mr. Obama’s interview on “60 Minutes,” when he laughed while discussing the unpopularity of auto executives.

“The intelligentsia has never liked this industry since Ralph Nader in the 1960s, and now they’ve got what they wanted,” Mr. Fortney said.

Cesar Muglia is a skilled trades worker at Ford Motor, working the same job that his father, also named Cesar, landed after emigrating from Argentina in the early 1960s.

Even though Ford is not applying for federal aid, Mr. Muglia estimated he had given up $12,000 worth of benefits in recent months, including the tuition assistance he hoped would pay for a master’s degree and a college scholarship for his daughter.

He and other Ford workers also lost cost-of-living increases and other payments when they agreed to concessions this winter that G.M. and Chrysler workers have yet to accept, even though their fates are on the line.

Even so, Mr. Muglia supports government help for Ford’s crosstown rivals, which he said deserve the money more than financial institutions. “These are loans,” he said of the $22 billion in additional money sought by the industry. “Those other industries, those were pretty much handouts.”

But even in Detroit, not everyone is willing to absolve the companies and their union from blame. “I knew we couldn’t keep going up, and up, and up,” said Bishop John Henry Sheard, leader of Bailey Cathedral, which represents 90 chapters of the United Church of God in Christ across Michigan.

Sitting in the chapel of the cathedral on Detroit’s northwest side, Bishop Sheard leveled criticism at both U.A.W. leaders and industry executives for negotiating contracts and accepting salaries he considered far too rich.

Normally, he would oppose the bailout “except to help the people who are suffering right now,” he said. “They need some help, regardless of how they got into that predicament.”

Like many here, Bishop Sheard, a native of Mississippi, is in Detroit because of the auto industry. His father first landed a $5-a-day job at the foundry at Ford’s giant Rouge plant in 1930, one of the few places blacks were allowed to work. Bishop Sheard eventually followed his father north, getting a job not in a car plant but in a car wash where he earned $35 a week. That was still $15 a week more than he received toiling in fields back home.

The chance for opportunity also drew Mr. Hershock’s family from Poland to a neighborhood in southwest Detroit, anchored by St. Hedwig’s Catholic Church. Now 106 years old, the soaring brick church still watches imposingly over a dwindling congregation that now encompasses two parishes, and whose school and convent have long since been sold off.

One day last week, Mr. Hershock, the University of Michigan professor, sat in the pew where his family once worshiped, beneath a stained glass window proclaiming, “Honor Thy Mother and Father.” His students include former auto workers who have been laid off and are trying to build new careers.

Without federal support for Detroit, still more workers could face a similar, uncertain fate, he said.